“Here’s the sick truth: the money makes me feel safe, the bad parts of the world kept at bay, a protection, at least for now,” confesses the narrator of Sarah Rose Etter’s Ripe (Scribner, July 2023). The novel is about money and madness and the shifty elusiveness of truth, but it’s also about the ways people remain mysteries to each other despite affection and even love: sometimes, for better or for worse, you marry a giraffe and get 58 weasels instead. Then we get a brand new narrator, decades in the future, and a final narrative that turns everything on its head. The first book closes with a startling, upsetting finale before the next narrative begins, this time a biographical account by the man upon whom that popular novel was based. When, soon after, Helen develops an illness, “her mind becoming the flesh for its own teeth,” Benjamin takes her to a sanatorium with a violent, experimental treatment. The pair hosts parties at their lavish home, darlings of New York society until it’s discovered, in the wake of the 1929 crash, that Benjamin not only profited from others’ distress, but perhaps even caused the bust.
The first is a popular 1937 novel about Benjamin and Helen Rask Benjamin is brilliant at making money in the stock market Helen is as adept at giving it away: to museums, concert halls, libraries, hospitals. “I’m not a giraffe, I’m 58 weasels in a trenchcoat.” Diaz’s novel is one novel and four discrete yet connected narratives, each deepening and complicating the ones that came before it. Trust (Riverhead, 2022), the brilliant, bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel by Hernan Diaz, reminds me of that New Yorker cartoon: “Now that we’re in love, I have a confession,” one character says to its giraffe partner. (In the book world, unionized HarperCollins employees ended a three-month strike in February after ratifying an agreement that included a base-wage hike this month, layoffs roiled that publisher as well as Penguin Random House, which also negotiated a round of high-profile buyouts.) Money in the land of late capitalism: can’t live without it… So here, three novels that explore the corrosive power of capital-plus a photo book of erotic dancers at small-town fairs, a self-professed scammer’s memoir, a novel about three women linked by their relationships with a powerful man, and more recent favorites from the staff of Vanity Fair. Some have deemed this season the summer of strikes: In Hollywood, the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA have instituted their first coinciding work stoppages since 1960 the United Auto Workers union is in heated contract negotiations, while the Teamsters union reached a tentative agreement just a week before its contract was set to expire. Today, when CEOs earn up to 1,000 times the salary of their typical workers, it can prove somewhat more divisive than reconciliatory. “What a charming reconciler and peacemaker money is!” William Thackeray muses, with characteristic irony, in his 1848 novel, Vanity Fair.
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